July 8- What I'm Doing, Where I'm Living, Who I'm With

I want to do my best to post a combination of informative “what’s happening in my life” posts with more thoughtful posts that give insight on aspects of Beninese culture, my evolving thoughts on my work/role here, etc.  Here’s the informative post for this time around.  I’m about two weeks into Pre-Service Training (PST in the acronym-heavy Peace Corps world).  During this training period, I’m officially a PCT (Peace Corps Trainee).  I’m living with a host family in Porto Novo, Benin’s second largest city.  My family is great!  I live with my father and mother who are both grandparent-age, and their adopted daughter who helps around the house.  Their two grown daughters are married, but live in Porto Novo and come over almost every day with their young daughters.  The oldest of these “little host sisters” is 7, and the younger two are ages 3 and 2.  I have my own room, with a large bed.  Like all Peace Corps volunteers, I have a mosquito net to sleep under – it feels a bit like camping out in one of those tents I used to make in the living room out of kitchen chairs and bed sheets.  My family is relatively well off – they have a car, and the house has running water and electricity.  Electricity is actually pretty standard in Porto Novo.  They also have two TVs, since as my host Dad explained he and my host mom sometimes can’t agree on which program to watch.  The TVs are right next to each other, and most evenings we watch two different Brazilian soap operas (dubbed into French) at the same time.

The first five weeks of Pre Service Training are focused on language.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, those of us who speak French already were given the option to learn one of Benin’s local languages instead of taking French classes.  This is what I’m doing.  I and another Environmental Action Trainee were both assigned to learn Bariba, a language spoken in the northern half of Benin.  Although nothing’s certain, this means that we’re likely to be assigned to posts in the north once we begin our service.  We will be learning our final post assignments in about 20 days.  The two of us are the only people in our Bariba class.  We meet with our teacher at a different location every day – sometimes my home, sometimes my classmate’s home, and sometimes where our teacher lives.  We also visit Bariba-speaking families in the neighborhood to practice.  About once or twice a week, all 67 of us trainees meet together for whole group sessions on cross-cultural topics, safety, and health.  Our last one involved a Beninese dance workshop – lots of fun!

The next few weeks will officially be “language immersion.”  This means that all of our activities will be in French, and we’re only to speak French to one another.  For those of us learning local language, this doesn’t make as much of a difference – we’ll continue pretty much as we have so far.  We are already using French in ourBariba class, and we already usually speak French together.  But we won’t be having as many large group sessions, so the focus will be even more language-intensive.  At the end of language immersion, when we find out our site placements, we’ll have a short workshop with the counterparts we’ll be working with at site and then go to our sites for two weeks to get to know the community and what sort of work we should be doing.  After that, we’ll be back in Porto Novo for four weeks of technical training in our program areas (Environment for me).  

All in all, it’s been, intense, stressful, exhilarating, heartwarming, and many other adjectives, often all at the same time.  I’ve written journal entries that have started with “I feel stressed out by being here today” and, in the time it’s taken me to write the entry, something has happened that has changed my perspective entirely to “I love it here, I love everyone I’m with, etc.”  From what I understand, that’s a pretty good taste of what service as a whole will be like.